Trim Healthy Mama - Asian Lettuce Cups

Quick Asian Lettuce Cups - Trim Healthy Mama

This can be put together quickly with ground meat, store bought shredded carrots, prepackaged coleslaw mix (shredded cabbage), or your food processor. A quick toss of raw peeled cubes of butter nut squash into the food processor will have this ready in no time! Then a quick stir fry, and you're ready to eat. Fabulous flavor, fiber, and figure friendly fun!

1 pound ground meat --use lean ground pork, chicken breast, turkey, grass fed beef, venison or other lean meat
1/4 tsp. black pepper
1/2 cup finely chopped green onion or scallion
2 small cloves garlic, pressed or minced
3 Tbsp. tamari or soy sauce
1 Tbsp. water
2 tsp. truvia sweetner, or sprinkles of pure stevia extract

1 T coconut oil or extra virgin olive oil for sauteeing
2 cups cabbage, shredded (1/2 small head or use pkg'ed preshredded)
1 Tbsp. of water
2 cups shredded peeled butternut squash or other raw winter squash or carrots (3 large raw) - not low carb

Iceberg lettuce, Romain Lettuce, or Other lettuce to make cups or wraps. Butter lettuce makes easy little cups too.

Directions:

Combine the ground meat, green onions, water, soy sauce,  sweetener, pepper, garlic, and water.  Marinate for 1/2 hour or add 1/4 tsp. meat tenderizer (unseasoned) and wait 5 minutes. 

Add oil to pan, heat.  Stir in meat mixture. Cook until meat loses its pinkness, but not quite done.  Remove from pan. 

Sauté vegetables in a small amount of oil for 2 minutes, then add the water, and cover and cook for 2 more minutes. Taste a shred of squash to see that it's crisp-tender (al dente).   Add meat and heat through to finish cooking.  Cayenne pepper, hot curry powder mix or red chili peppers may be added to make it spicy for the adventurous eater. Serve piled into crisp lettuce cups, or serve with crisp leaves of lettuce for diners to roll up their own like a soft taco. Quinoa or brown rice cooked in broth is nice served alongside.  This is excellent with a Quick cucumber salad. Recipe included below.

Quick Cucumber Salad.

Peel a large cucumber or leave zucchini unpeeled, slice into matchsticks or rectangles, and set aside. In small bowl, stir 2T truvia into 2 T. of vinegar of your choice. Add 1 tsp. real salt or celtic salt. Stir until crystals all dissolve, add 1/4 tsp. powdered ginger, and pinch of turmeric. Stir well, and toss with match stick cucumbers. Match cut Radishes may be added if desired.  If desired a sprinkle of cayenne powder may be added to the dressing. This can be eaten right away.
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Trim Healthy Mama - Swiss Chard Pockets with sausage and turkey

My camera is out of commission, so this is not my photo, but our stuffed swiss chard pockets looked eerily similar. Just picture the toddler helped me pour the spaghetti sauce over the top in our 13 x9 casserole pan. Thank you.

Swiss chard cooks tender rather quickly, so it doesn't require the long cooking that cabbage rolls would. My family likes sausage so that's a natural marriage in our household, to include sausage and ground turkey as a filling for swiss chard pockets.

Ingredients:
16 swiss chard leaves (large)
1 large sweet onion, chopped small
1 pound turkey or venison sausage (breakfast or Italian style)
1 pound ground turkey, plain
1 quart of marinara or spaghetti sauce, no sugar added please
1 8 oz. can Hunt's tomato sauce (this is natural, no sugar added)
2 tsp. oregano leaf, dried or few tablespoons chopped fresh leaves

Preheat oven to 375* F, or Gas mark 5 for my European friends.

Wash and dry the swiss chard leaves, and cut the large celery like stems off, and mince the stems and set them aside.

Saute' in a non-stick pan your sausage and ground turkey meat, the onion, the chopped chard stems, then season it all with garlic salt or minced garlic and celtic salt. When meat is cooked through, add canned tomato sauce and oregano, and stir to combine. Taste to be sure it's well-seasoned.  Cook a little longer to dry the mixture up a bit, so it's not too loose. Divide the meat mixture into 16 servings, roughly, so that you can fill each leaf.

Use cooking spray to coat 13x9 or similar baking pan. On a large cutting board or dinner plate lay out the raw swiss chard leaf, and spoon a narrow allotment of sausage mix into the leaf, fold or roll, seam side down and lay it into your pan. The food police do not live at your house, so just get them stuffed and folded and filled. Repeat 15 times, then sprinkle the rolls with a little salt and pepper, cover the pan of rolls with the quart of spaghetti sauce, wrap tightly with aluminum foil or other lid, and bake in oven for 1 hour until rolls are fall apart tender.

This dish has enough sauce that you'll be pondering serving it over mashed potatoes for those with high metabolisms, or faux-tatoes (creamed mashed cauliflower) for the rest of us, or even 3/4 cup of steamed quinoa. It's very good any of those ways. You can have this delicious dinner guilt free, and even top it with parmesan cheese if you like.

This is low fat, and has a reasonably small amount of carbohydrates, which would be an E food for the THM plan.